This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

I encourage you to read this recently published, downloadable piece on TFA with co-authors Michael Barnes and Emily Germain.

-Angela

Abstract

We read and analyzed 165,000 words and uncover a series of
counter-stories buried within a textual corpus, authored by Teach For
America (TFA) founder Wendy Kopp (Kopp, 1989, 2001; Kopp & Farr,
2011), that offers insight into the forms of racism endemic to Teach For
America. All three counter-stories align with a critical race theory
(CRT) framework. Specifically, we answer the following questions: What
evidence of institutional and epistemological racism is exposed by a
CRT textual analysis of TFA’s founding document and later works by Wendy
Kopp? To what extent has TFA appropriated the language of culturally
relevant pedagogy, while advancing an uninterrogated neoliberal
ideology? And, to what extent does TFA’s contribution to a “culture of
achievement” (Kopp & Farr, 2011) constitute an actual “poverty of
culture” (Ladson-Billings, 2006a) that enacts real harms on communities
of color?